Interactive Map of World’s Languages
from Atlas of the World’s Languages
This visualization explores the distribution of world’s languages based on the Asher & Moseley (2007) Atlas of the World’s Languages. This visualization builds on the recent work of Ranacher et al. (2025), who created a global and interoperable dataset of linguistic distributions derived from the Atlas of the World’s Languages. Each polygon represents a geographic area where a specific language is spoken. Two maps are shown for each language: one for the traditional speaker areas and one for the contemporary speaker areas.
Important! The resolution of the map is reduced to 5% of the original data via ms_simplify function to reduce the size of the rendered HTML page. If you need higher resolution, you can remove the ms_simplify line in the prepare_geojson_data function and render the qmd file locally.
Main Interactive Maps
Major Language Families
Below are interactive maps for major language families in the traditional and contemporary data. Each family shows traditional (left) and contemporary (right) maps side-by-side. Hover over any polygon to see detailed language information.